Battery versus infrastructure: Tradeoffs between battery capacity and charging infrastructure for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

Abstract

Battery systems and charging infrastructures are essential, cost intense, and partly interchangeable building blocks of electric mobility. Although both building blocks are expected to develop favorably in the coming years, their current limitations hinder the adoption of electric vehicles. As their advancement competes for limited resources, it is of interest to quantify the trade-offs between battery capacity and charging infrastructure improvements in order to allocate research and development resources and public spending effectively. In an analysis that utilizes mobility data from a large cohort of regular drivers, we assess the impact of three electric mobility scenario parameters – battery capacity, charging infrastructure coverage, and charging power – on key performance indicators and side effects of electric mobility. The study goes beyond the state-of-the-art in several ways, including the large amount of driving data that serves as input (909 conventional vehicles monitored over two years while traveling over 46.5 million km (28.9 million miles)), the quality of the movement data (profiles based on global positioning systems), and the use of clustering that allows us to assess driver segments separately within one coherent analysis. For 180 battery-infrastructure scenarios, we derive energy consumption and charging behavior of the vehicles, electric reachability of destinations, electric mileage share of hybrid vehicles, and grid impact (electricity demand and time of peaks). Results show that realistic battery capacity improvements dispel concerns about the need for a dense charging infrastructure. We find that only small segments of long-range drivers and vehicles with very limited electric range benefit much from a dense charging network. Moreover, we observe that the benefits of fast charging are small for most driver segments even if charging can take place only at the home location.